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BigBlueButton

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by BigBlueButton Inc. · bigbluebutton.org

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Works Council Advocate

Weighted verdict

A recorded meeting is personal data about everyone in it. Wants to know who may record, who is told, how long it is kept, and whether attention tracking or attendance analytics can be switched off outright. Reads engagement scoring as surveillance with a chart.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Works Council Advocate

The meeting itself

How this is scored

Whether the call works: participant capacity, video and audio quality under load, screen sharing, breakout rooms, moderation, and what happens on a bad connection.

0 — Small meetings only, no screen sharing worth the name, no moderation controls, and the call degrades without telling anyone.

3 — Standard meetings with screen sharing and mute-all, but low participant limits, no breakout rooms and no bandwidth adaptation stated.

5 — Meetings at the scale most teams need with screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, and documented behaviour on constrained connections.

8 — Large meetings and webinars with published capacity limits, per-participant moderation and waiting rooms, layout control, simulcast or adaptive bitrate stated, and reliable behaviour on mobile networks.

10 — Scale and control are engineering claims the vendor stands behind: capacity published per plan and per region, selective forwarding with adaptive quality documented, live streaming, hardware-room support, and diagnostics an admin can read after a bad call.

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The Works Council Advocate

Breakout rooms up to eight, a lobby where guests wait until a moderator reviews them, per-participant permissions with visible lock notices, and mute of the active speaker give a chairperson genuine control of the room. We found no public information on published participant capacity, adaptive video quality, or how a call behaves on a constrained connection, which is what keeps this out of the top band. 2 4 5 9

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Encryption & meeting access

How this is scored

What is actually encrypted and against whom, plus who can get into a meeting. Judged on documented mechanism rather than on the word "encrypted".

0 — Transport encryption only, undocumented; meetings joinable by anyone with a link and no lobby.

3 — TLS in transit and encryption at rest, with the vendor holding all keys; access control is a passcode.

5 — The above plus a lobby or waiting room, host-controlled admission, per-meeting passcodes, and a clear statement that the vendor can technically access media.

8 — Optional end-to-end encryption for meetings with the trade-offs named (which features stop working), documented key handling, SSO-gated joining, and per-meeting access policies.

10 — End-to-end encryption available without surrendering the product — its cryptography documented or open source, key management explained, identity verification for participants, and the vendor stating plainly what it can and cannot see.

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The Works Council Advocate

Access control is real: arrivals wait in a lobby until a moderator decides, the guest policy can turn people away outright, and an institution's SAML identity provider can gate sign-in — though it is described as beta. The privacy policy offers only 'reasonable administrative, technical and physical measures' and we found no public information on any encryption mechanism, so we cannot say what is encrypted or against whom; open source makes the code inspectable, but that is not a documented statement. 3 5 6

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Reach & accessibility

How this is scored

Whether everyone who needs to join can: browser without an install, dial-in, low bandwidth, guests without accounts, captions and keyboard operation.

0 — A desktop client is the only way in; guests must create an account.

3 — Browser joining exists but is degraded, guests can join by link, and there is no dial-in and no accessibility statement.

5 — Full-feature browser joining without an install, guest access by link, mobile apps, and a stated accessibility posture.

8 — Telephone dial-in with numbers listed, live captions, keyboard-navigable and screen-reader-tested interface, and documented low-bandwidth behaviour.

10 — Reach is designed for: browser parity with the client, dial-in across the regions the customer operates in, live captions and translation, a published accessibility conformance report, and a usable experience on a poor mobile connection.

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The Works Council Advocate

Accessibility is documented unusually seriously for this market: WCAG 2.0 Level AA validated by a named external expert in September 2023 with the exceptions spelled out, screen-reader work with JAWS, keyboard navigation, moderator-enabled live captions, and full browser joining with no install or external login. We found no public information on telephone dial-in or on documented behaviour on a poor connection, which is what holds it below the top band. 7 8 12

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Recordings, retention & admin control

How this is scored

A recording is personal data about everyone in the room. Who may record, who is told, where it is stored, how long it lives, and what the works council can switch off.

0 — Anyone can record, storage location unstated, no retention rule, no admin policy.

3 — Host-only recording with a notification, but storage region unstated, retention manual, and no organisation-wide policy control.

5 — Admin policy over who may record, participant notification and consent prompt, stated storage region, and manual deletion that works.

8 — Automatic retention and deletion per policy, recordings encrypted at rest with access logged, transcription handled with its own retention rule, and attendance or analytics features that can be switched off for co-determination.

10 — Built for a works agreement: every recording, transcript and analytics feature independently switchable and documented, retention executed and evidenced, an audit trail of who accessed which recording, and no participant-level behavioural scoring at all.

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The Works Council Advocate

The bones of a works agreement exist: recording must be enabled for the meeting and started manually by a moderator, breakout rooms cannot be recorded at all, and administrators can search, rename and delete every recording on the server. But we found no public information on a participant notification or consent prompt when recording starts, no storage region, no automatic retention, and the privacy policy even warns archived data may be impossible to delete — and the Learning Analytics Dashboard scores each participant's relative activity live, with no public information on whether that scoring can be switched off. 3 4 9 10 11

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Integrations & deployment

How this is scored

Calendar, identity and the wider stack — plus, in this category, whether the product can be run on the customer's own infrastructure at all.

0 — No calendar integration, no SSO, no API; cloud-only with no alternative.

3 — One calendar integration and basic SSO, no API worth building on, cloud-only.

5 — Calendar integration for the major suites, SAML or OIDC SSO, a documented API for scheduling, and room-system support.

8 — The above plus SCIM provisioning, embedding via SDK, webhooks for meeting events, and either a self-hosted option or a documented private-cloud deployment.

10 — Deployment is the customer's choice: a genuine on-premises or private-cloud option with the same features, open protocols or open source, embeddable SDKs, and identity integration that does not require the vendor's directory.

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The Works Council Advocate

Moodle 4.0 ships the integration in its core and over twenty thousand registered Moodle sites run the plugin, other LMS suites adopt it, and SAML sign-in exists in beta — but we found no public information on calendar integration with the major office suites, a documented scheduling API, or automated provisioning. The genuinely open-source self-hosted deployment, where a customer runs the server entirely on its own infrastructure, is what lifts this category. 1 6 11 12

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where media and metadata are processed, who the contracting entity is, which subprocessors carry the traffic. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it — which in this category is heavily.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, media routed through unstated regions, subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU data residency for storage while media relays or metadata remain non-EU, or the contracting entity sits outside the EU.

5 — EU hosting and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — relays, analytics, support tooling, transcription — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — Media and metadata processed in the EU on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: media never leaves the EU, every subprocessor European, certification published, and an on-premises option that removes the question entirely.

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The Works Council Advocate

The contracting entity sits in Ottawa, Ontario, the captured pages state no data residency anywhere, the servers 'may be hosted by a third party service provider' that is never named, and Google Analytics runs on the sites. Only the install-your-own-server route lets a customer place the media in Europe by its own hand; the commercial path as published gives a non-EU entity, unnamed subprocessors, and unstated regions, and this buyer weighs that heavily. 1 3 11

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the annual invoice for their host count — including the capacity, dial-in and recording storage they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A per-host headline exists, but participant caps, dial-in minutes or recording storage are unpriced or unmentioned.

5 — Per-host prices public with billing period stated and capacity limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (webinar capacity, dial-in, storage) sits in an unpriced add-on.

8 — Every tier and add-on priced publicly with per-host maths, capacity limits, dial-in rates, storage allowances, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator producing the annual invoice for a given host count, meeting size and recording volume, including overage and per-region dial-in.

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The Works Council Advocate

The only public price is a free hosting offer whose limits are spelled out honestly: up to 25 users, sixty-minute sessions, only the moderator's webcam visible to viewers, recordings expiring after seven days. Beyond that we found no public information on what paid hosting or commercial support costs, what capacity comes with it, or on any term or storage allowance, so a buyer cannot compute an invoice from public pages. 11

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (12)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Project homepage bigbluebutton.org Checked 16 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Product page bigbluebutton.org Checked 16 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Privacy policy bigbluebutton.org Checked 16 Sep 2026 Details →
  4. 4 The meeting itself — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 The meeting itself — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Encryption & meeting access — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Reach & accessibility — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Reach & accessibility — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Recordings, retention & admin control — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Recordings, retention & admin control — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Integrations & deployment — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Integrations & deployment — found from sitemap bigbluebutton.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →